When This World Comes to an End

By Kate Cayley

Kate Cayley’s is a mind both studious and curious, deeply attuned to the question “what if?” What if Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson met in the afterlife? What if a respected physician suddenly shrank to the size of a pea? What if the blind twins in a Victorian photograph could speak to us? What if we found another Earth orbiting another sun?

Cayley draws on her experience as a playwright to create vividly engaging voices and characters ranging from the famous to the infamous to the all-but-anonymous. With exquisite pacing and striking imagery she draws us into the gaps in history, invites us to survey its wonders, both real and imaginary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Feb 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771314183

Kate Cayley

Kate Cayley is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer living in Toronto. She is the author of one previous poetry collection (When This World Comes to an End, Brick Books), a young adult novel (The Hangman in the Mirror, Annick Press), and a short story collection (How You Were Born, Pedlar Press), which won the 2015 Trillium Book Award and was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Award. She has been a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto since 2009, and has written two plays produced by Tarragon, After Akhmatova and The Bakelite Masterpiece.

Book preview

When This World Comes to an End

When This World Comes to an End

KATE CAYLEY

BRICK BOOKS

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Cayley, Kate




When this world comes to an end. / Kate Cayley

Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-771314-18-3

I. Title.

PS8605.A945W44 2013      C811'6     C2013-900059-3

copyright © Kate Cayley, 2013

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The author photo was taken by Carmen Farrell.

The print edition of the book is set in Minion Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach and released in 1990 by Adobe Systems.

The cover image is Diving horse, 1908 from the William James collection, City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 191.

Print design and layout by Cheryl Dipede.

Printed and bound by Sunville Printco Inc.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Poems that journey through a tapestry of myths, archetypes and fables; of histories invented and revisited.

Kate Cayley’s is a mind both studious and curious, deeply attuned to the question what if? What if Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson met in the afterlife? What if a respected physician suddenly shrank to the size of a pea? What if the blind twins in a Victorian photograph could speak to us? What if we found another Earth orbiting another sun?

Cayley draws on her experience as a playwright to create vividly engaging voices and characters ranging from the famous to the infamous to the all-but-anonymous. With exquisite pacing and striking imagery she draws us into the gaps in history, invites us to survey its wonders, both real and imaginary.

For Dan DeMatteis

There is a light in the darkness and the darkness has never quenched it

CONTENTS

BOOK OF DAYS

Zola, Bravest of Leonardo’s Apprentices, Leaps from the Tower of San Francesco Wearing His Master’s Wings

Persephone

The Later Auden

William Kemmler Remembering his Wife

Reading Gwendolyn MacEwen’s T. E. Lawrence poems

Charles Dodgson Looking at Alice Liddell

The Later Life of Judas Iscariot

Simone Weil

Walking

Neanderthal Man, Theory and Practice

Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson Meet in the Afterlife

A Journey by Train

CURIO: TWELVE PHOTOGRAPHS

Daguerre Photographs Paris, 1838

A Wedding